A century on, don't blame Sykes-Picot for the Middle East's troubles

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François Georges-Picot , left, and Sir Mark Sykes carved up the old Ottoman empire between the British and the FrenchCredit:
Creative Commons & Getty

Exactly a century ago, an Englishman and a Frenchman unrolled a map of the Middle East and drew an improbably straight line across the desert. With one pen-stroke, Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot created the modern states of the region and carelessly lit the fuse of a thousand conflicts that blaze even today.

By drawing a line from contemporary Iraq to the Mediterranean, they ignored explosive ethnic and religious divides. In this way, Britain and France carved up the Middle East after the First World War, jointly committing the original sin that lurks behind today’s tragedies.

So runs the folklore version of the Sykes-Picot agreement, whose centenary falls on Monday. This critique has gained such power that it has entered popular culture, largely because of David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia.

But even the most impassioned condemnation can be mistaken. In truth, the popular version of Sykes-Picot misunderstands almost every aspect of the agreement. After the passage of 100 years, the Middle East’s bloodshed can no longer be blamed on a map drawn by the Conservative MP for Hull Central (Sykes) and a relatively junior French diplomat (Picot).

No borders, however ingenious, were going to create homogeneous countries out of a singularly diverse region of the Middle East

True enough, their line sliced through ethnic and religious communities. But how could it have done otherwise? No borders, however ingenious, were going to create homogeneous countries out of a singularly diverse region of the Middle East. The crescent stretching from the Tigris to the Mediterranean - then and now - is intermingled with Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shias, Christians, Druze and Alawites.

The new countries that would emerge from the Ottoman Empire after the First World War were always going to be multi-ethnic and multi-confessional. That much was preordained.

The critique of Sykes-Picot implicitly assumes that there was an answer to the problem of how to govern a post-Ottoman Middle East. The truth may be worse: perhaps there was no solution and conflict was inevitable.

As it happens, today’s map of the region differs substantially from what Sykes and Picot envisaged. Large sections of their agreement were quickly abandoned. Under their formula, Mosul – today the second city of Iraq – would never have been in Iraq at all. They were going to place Mosul in Syria, thereby excluding a large number of Sunni Arabs and Kurds from Iraq and, as it happens, making the country more homogeneous - and the task of a Baghdad government slightly less onerous - than it is today.

When the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) destroyed a border post near Mosul in 2014, they claimed credit for obliterating the Sykes-Picot boundary. In fact, Sykes had died of Spanish flu by the time that section of the frontier between Iraq and Syria was fixed at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

At root, however, the critique of Sykes-Picot does not rest on the idea that the border was in the wrong place or that it failed to take account of ethnic complexities. Instead, the central criticism is that Britain and France had no business imposing frontiers on the Middle East at all.

This condemnation gathers force from the fact that Sykes-Picot was a secret arrangement; moreover, its terms supposedly betrayed earlier promises made by Britain to the Arabs.

But even this aspect of the indictment is less powerful than you might think. Was Sykes-Picot kept secret? Yes, but only for a year. Historians often write that Russia disclosed the agreement after the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917.

In fact, Sykes and Picot travelled to Jeddah five months earlier, in May 1917, to meet Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca and leader of the Arab revolt, and brief him on their accord.

The Sykes-Picot agreement was worded precisely so as not to conflict – rather so as exactly to fit in – with [Britain’s] pledges to the ArabsElie Kedourie

Perhaps surprisingly, Hussein raised no particular objections. His secretary, Fuad al-Khatib, later recalled that “Hussein had on that occasion been quite content with the terms of the agreement".

As for the idea that Sykes-Picot broke Britain’s earlier promises to the Arabs, these pledges were contained in the correspondence between Sharif Hussein and Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt.

One of the few historians to read all those exchanges, dating from 1915-16, was Elie Kedourie, the late professor of politics at London University. His painstaking book, aptly entitled In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth, comes to an emphatic conclusion: “The Sykes-Picot agreement was worded precisely so as not to conflict – rather so as exactly to fit in – with [Britain’s] pledges to the Arabs.”

The notion of Sykes-Picot as original sin is more legend than reality. A century on, the Arab world should look elsewhere to explain its troubles.